Kill This Thing Before it Grows
by Klayter McCabe
Summary: Chase and Cameron are all about House, whether they like it or not. "Chase wants to be hurt or angry or offended, but he is merely unsurprised and vaguely guilty." Follow up to "Half-Wit"


**Kill This Thing Before it Grows**

_Klayter McCabe_

The night they learn House is not going to die - that he was never sick - Cameron and Chase get blitzed. It has been years since Cameron was so drunk she couldn't get up off the floor; it has been less long for Chase.

"I just can't believe he'd do that," Cameron slurs again. "That he'd be so cruel to us." Her hair is spread in a halo around her head on the beige carpet.

"You're reading it wrong." Chase sounds less drunk, but isn't. He has his mother's knack for seeming sober. "It didn't have anything to do with us."

Cameron snorts. "Yeah, he just left all those clues for _nobody _to find."

Chase laughs too loudly, his inebriation apparent in those syllables in a way it is not when he uses words. "They weren't clues, Allison. We went _looking_." He pauses. "Didn't you start it? By opening his mail?"

"I _always_ open his mail. Otherwise it just gets thrown away."

"...And when we broke into his apartment?"

"I was defending my job," she says. "It would be just like him to leave us without any warning."

"You mean just like him to leave Princeton-Plainsboro."

Cameron is quiet. Chase stays slumped in an armchair, looking down at her. She lifts one of her legs to rest her ankle on his knees, and he places two fingers on her medial malleolus.

"You're the one who wanted to have sex in his bed," she snaps. Chase gently strokes her leg.

"I thought it would turn you on."

Cameron closes her eyes. From this angle the shadow of his chair covers half her face. "It did," she whispers.

Chase wants to be hurt or angry or offended, but he is merely unsurprised and vaguely guilty. It turned him on, too.

"I kissed him," Cameron confesses. "Trying to take a blood sample."

Chase withdraws his hand, though she leaves her leg rested on his own. "This isn't a relationship," he says. "You don't have to tell me things like that."

"He kissed me back," she says. Chase closes his eyes, but this makes the world spin, and he feels sick to his stomach. He stands up to get a glass of water and her leg thumps down on the carpet. Chase stumbles over her, but catches himself on the edge of the wall and looms there, balanced just over Cameron's chest.

"I don't want to know," he says. "If you and me are just about him. That's fine, that's how you want to do this. But don't _tell me_ about it."

He straightens up, but is too dizzy to make it to the kitchen and back. He slides down the wall until he is crouched on the carpet next to her.

"I'm glad he's not dying," he says slowly. Cameron scoots towards him, and he opens up his posture until she can rest her head on his leg. Even at this distance they can smell the alcohol on each other's breath.

"Me too," Cameron murmurs.

"I gave him a hug," Chase says. "The last time I saw my own dad alive all he got was a handshake."

Cameron is quiet. The magnitude of this confession both weighs her down and buoys her up.

"I thought you hated your father," she says slowly.

"I do."

Her head is still on Chase's lap, but he stares at the wall opposite them, hands loose and resting on the carpet.

"I asked him to have a drink with me, the last time he was in town. He was dying of cancer, and I didn't know it. He said he had a plane to catch." Speaking is exhausting. He feels empty.

Cameron sinks and floats. In this moment she loves Chase completely, the way she loves martyrs and children and the idea that all people have something fundamentally good buried in their hearts. She reaches up and runs a hand along his stubble, tracing the lines of a younger Chase hidden in his grown-up face. He blinks down at her, as if startled to find that she is still there.

"I did worse than you," Chase adds, trying to make his voice light. "At least you got some tongue. When I hugged him he just held perfectly still and made smartass remarks." He laughs suddenly. "If I hugged him and you kissed him, Foreman must have tried sucking cock."

Cameron smiles and shakes her head. "He just tried to talk him into a treatment plan."

They're quiet, but this registers in Cameron's brain, though her sober self will not think of it again for months: she went to trick House, and Foreman went to convince him, but Chase went with empty hands. It's like something from a children's book, as if love alone could cure the sick.

In some awkward, unspeakable way, she is jealous.

Cameron wraps her arms around Chase's neck and pulls herself into a sitting position in his lap. She kisses him quickly, then runs her tongue along his bottom lip. Chase takes a long few heartbeats to respond.

"I think," he says quietly, "I might be too drunk."

Cameron presses her body against his, looking for an answering erection.

"I mean," Chase says, "if I move too much, I think I'll vomit."

Cameron scuttles off his lap so fast it should be comical, except that she feels nauseated, too. She leans against the wall next to him. They hold this tableau for what feels like a long time, both of them drunk and tired and angry and melancholy.

"Well," she says, to take his mind off it, "for an Australian, you sure can't hold your liquor."

She looks over at him, waiting for an indignant response, but Chase's eyes are closed, and his breathing is steady.

"Chase?" she says.

He is dead to the world. Cameron uses the table to drag herself to her feet, then steadies herself against the wall to make it into the kitchen. She fills two glasses with tap water, spilling remarkably little of it on the carpet, and fumbles with a bottle of aspirin from the cupboard. She takes a few sip of water, then chases down one of the pills with the rest of the glass. She sets the other glass and a couple of pills on the table near Chase, and covers him with a throw blanket from the couch. His blond hair covers his closed eyes, and for a moment he could be anyone passed out in her living room - then she blinks and he coalesces into himself again. Looking at him, she knows that a terrible seed has been planted, that Chase is someone with hurts as deep as anyone else's, and that if she does not kill this thing, it will grow.

Less than a month later, she dumps him.

At the time, it does not feel like a mistake.

000

"Cleareyed"

Glen Phillips

_Winter Pays for Summer_


End file.
